2 Poems by Norman Dubie

THE POEM OF WINTER MORNING

Voices moving over a North Atlanticcable, the cold watermaking yellow glyphs like weird melonson the sea floor. The mooninterrupts themnow clearing its throat.My sister says she’s felthopeless most of this day.She expects more of the same tomorrow.

ROMANCE

A gray plate of steaming musselsand a draught saucerof butter with floating slivers of garlic—Van Gogh coughs an affirmationat his brother who putshis brown cigarette on the edge of the table—he walks downthe long street. He enteredthe rain, leaving the green awning.Each passing second they aresomewhat more distant. They’reboth infected with syphilis.Theo is visiting his new girlfriend. She isnot suffering with his infection.

He gives her a dripping wetbouquet of stolen calamus.In fact, Theo thinksshe is still a virgin. She isn’t.In less than a decade they all aredead and buried. The two brothersbelieve in the superstitionof posterity. Her syphilis actuallywas congenital. As of last Aprilall of them were entirely virginal.They do remain my best and onlyimaginary friends. I likea feint of mustard with my mussels.I like the rain.

Norman Dubie’s most recent collection of poems is The Quotations of Bone (Copper Canyon Press, 2015), winner of the International Griffin Poetry Prize. He has recently completed two manuscripts, The Egg Clock and Robert Schumann is Mad Again. He teaches at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ.